Small multiples in Excel that actually share a scale

A panel chart — small multiples, trellis, lattice, call it what you like — shows the same chart repeated for every region, product or partner so they can be read against each other. The comparison is the entire point, and the comparison only holds if every panel is on the same scale.

The obvious way to build one in Excel is to make a chart and copy it fifteen times. That gives you fifteen chart objects with fifteen value axes, and the moment one panel's data moves, its axis rescales and the grid silently stops meaning what it looks like it means. Nothing warns you. The picture still looks like a small multiple.

This builds the whole grid as a single native chart object instead. The value axis is divided into bands, one per grid row, and every panel is plotted into its band against one minimum and one maximum for the entire sheet. One axis, one scale, no drift — and because it is a native chart with live formulas behind it, you can still click a cell and watch the grid move.

Six chart kinds ship as worked examples — line, column, area, bar, pin and dot — each at a different grid size. The pin chart is drawn with a marker plus a custom Y error bar as its stem, because Excel caps gap width at 500% and a column simply will not go thin enough.

You do not need Claude Code to get value from the file. The workbook is a living document that updates when the placeholder data changes — paste your own numbers over the input block and the grid redraws itself. The written guide walks the same construction by hand, for anyone who would rather build it themselves, or who needs it in a workbook they cannot run Python against.

The Claude Code skill can, however, create panel charts at grid sizes other than the six demonstrated in the spreadsheet — any rows by columns you ask for. That is the part most likely to earn its keep day to day: laying out an arbitrary panel grid by hand in Excel is genuinely tedious work, and this removes it entirely.

It is free to use and free to modify — MIT licensed, with no attribution required.